Donato Dozzy & Batu: The Expanding Universe

Donato Dozzy and Batu may come from different generations and zones of the electronic music continuum, but their paths have been crossing, fatefully, for nearly a decade. Now, they’re playing an ongoing game of “ping-pong production” that brings together Bristol bass futurism and hypnotic minimal techno.

You’d struggle to find good fortune in the middle of a typhoon. Indeed, when one of the largest ever seen barreled towards Gunma, Japan – the site of 2019’s Labyrinth Festival – Omar McCutcheon had his planned set canned and was instead holed up in a hotel room for four hours. The Bristol artist, better known as Batu, wasn’t complaining; he was trapped with the rest of the festival line-up, which included his techno heroes like DJ Nobu, Surgeon, Peter Van Hoesen and Italian minimal tech shaman Donato Dozzy. He spent most of those four hours with Dozzy, picking his brain and absorbing his unique energy, and the Rome-born artist, impressed by how McCutcheon handled the situation like a gentleman, kept in touch.

The situation officially became recurring at 2024’s Ion Festival in Albania. That too was rained off but gave the pair time to eat good food and marvel at how much they had in common despite the generational gap. With a combined 60 years experience of DJing, they know how to read the signs.

As Batu, McCutcheon has been a totem for Bristol’s experimental, techno-influenced bass scene for over a decade. Consider the cumulative impact of his alchemical productions, standout DJ sets and the output of his intrepid Timedance label, and you can trace how the UK rave continuum has innovated beyond the post-dubstep of Hessle Audio and Swamp 81, communicating with global club sounds and the unspoken futures that lie within those connections. Militantly optimistic about new music throughout his career, his rise coincides with Crack’s own history, this being his third feature in nine years.

“It’s been a hectic time recently because I’ve just moved house and had a lot of things going on,” McCutcheon says over Zoom as we wait for Dozzy to join. His last set was almost two weeks ago, at Skrillex’s new CONTRA event series at Kraftwerk, Berlin, which has him reflecting on his changing feelings towards what the once-maligned brostep producer represents. Dozzy then joins from his beach house in Italy, announcing from nowhere, “Sorry, I woke up ten minutes ago!”

The man they call il professore has spent the past two decades bringing third-wave Italian techno to a creative high point. He’s acquired an almost religious fandom for his gorgeously trippy, botanical music, which unfolds as poetically as his reflections on music, creation and life itself. Tracks like Gol, Vaporware 07 and S.T. as Voices From the Lake stop you from listening in terms of four-bar loops and instead in hypnotic, spell-casting undulations of synth. Next to Ricardo Villalobos, he’s one of the most temporally demanding DJs in the world – someone who really gets going in the third hour. Hang on to his soft conviction, though, and he’s liable to outright leave the decks and embrace the crowd, as he did during his near-mythical set at 2008’s Labyrinth Festival.

True to his professorial nickname, he’s just spent a week near Milan leading a class as part of the Terraforma Radical School, a four-day immersive arts programme arranged by the former Terraforma Festival. “It was beautiful,” he enthuses. “I had 15 students, and I guided them through the process of a sound installation, starting with a field recording. It was beautiful to see these students cooperating with each other and discovering their potential in this field. I really feel like teaching is something that belongs to me,” he says, pushing up his iconic Kuboraum-designed glasses.

A creative team-up between Batu and Donato Dozzy may seem surprising – for the former, Dozzy follows recent collaborations with FKA twigs, Nick León and Paul St Hilaire – but fate was already aligning their trajectories before they had even met. It was Dozzy being rushed to hospital that led to Batu being called up to headline Dekmantel Selectors in 2018, a star-making set that ballooned his booking schedule and established him as a DJ in his own right after years of producing. “I’m glad I sacrificed myself to make that happen!” Dozzy jokes.

Five years later, the pair were unveiled as the secret b2b set at Tilburg’s Draaimolen Festival. Staring down a three-hour stretch of unbeaten path, the two opted to go in completely improvised. Batu didn’t give Dozzy his usual patient start, and together they shifted into unexpected territory: grimier, dirtier material, squeezed braindance and hard-edged spiritual techno. “We’d spoken for a few years at that point about making music together, and it was as fun and easy as I hoped,” McCutcheon adds. “When that happens, and when you have such a feeling with the person next to you,” Dozzy closes out, “to collaborate in the studio is the natural next step.”

That moment came in February 2025, when McCutcheon was in Rome to DJ and extended his trip by an extra day. “I invited him to stay at my place for the evening,” Dozzy says. “I turned the studio on, and it began the ‘ping-pong production’ between us, as I call it.” McCutcheon had heard plenty about Dozzy’s fabled studio: the character of his analogue gear, which fuels his famous bond with it, and the lack of any seating to keep the creative process active and upright. But that evening, time moved at a frighteningly intense pace.

The collaborative album sparked by this inaugural session, Exhale, is the sound of two craftsmen wading into each other’s worlds. Within a pair of beatless bookends, the LP improvises across six different rhythmic frameworks, including a high-torque jungle hybrid and sky-splitting, technoid dubstep à la Beatrice M, each providing a springboard for their emerging chemistry. You can hear one artist trading off to the other on Drift, as tensely swung drums unknot into a satisfying techno thump. Bloom closes with a simple two-note sway that recalls Dozzy’s most intimate chord progressions, only made hazy with muffled, trilling hand drums taken from Batu’s usual percussive setup. Such a precise-sounding and detail-rich release must have occupied the two for weeks, possibly even months?

“All the sketches were recorded in about three hours,” Dozzy reveals, as if that’s normal. “Every sketch was recorded completely on the fly.” They made 12 “sketches” that evening, hopping from machine to machine and connecting cables like Doctor Who circling the TARDIS console. “We just had a lot of ideas,” McCutcheon says, eyes toggling in search of an explanation.

Dozzy took the lead from the off, setting an idea and testing the visitor to complete it. One might assume that the twitchy, broken rhythms of Drift or the hurried, smeared amapiano of Swarm were products of Batu, but McCutcheon says otherwise when Dozzy has to leave the call briefly. “All of the frameworks that are still there in their original form come from Donato, you know. I think they were him imitating me,” he says quietly. “Donato is slightly different from other techno producers, as he has a real appreciation of bass and soundsystem culture. There’s a side of this music that has this submerged jungle feel. It’s not a situation I’ll take for granted. Throughout the whole process, Donato had trust in me.”

“And I don’t trust many people in my life!” Dozzy quips back into the conversation. “The challenge was to make sounds that would fit his personality. It’s like painting a portrait of someone, you know?” he continues. “I recorded sounds I knew would be the correct frame for the portrait he wanted to build.”

As a producer who has never deviated from making music digitally, working with analogue gear – and all the inherent unpredictabilities that come with it – gave Batu permission to throw caution to the wind and free himself from the rigid structures of beat grids and sequencer timelines.

Dozzy entered production in the late 80s, when hardware ruled the studio, and has never strayed from the medium. Having amassed a vast, interconnected web of modular machines, he knows all their peculiar behaviours, like how his Roland Juno-60 “goes crazy” when you rerecord a MIDI sequence with the arpeggiator on. So intimate is his knowledge that he frequently chats with them, addressing them as “him”, and has developed an elite pragmatism that allows him to pinpoint how to achieve a particular sound before even entering the studio. “Compared to 25 years ago, I spend way less time in the studio,” he says. “I don’t need to go round the sounds and see what I’m looking for. If I get to experiment on the machines and I have an idea on my mind, I execute the idea.”

Under Dozzy’s observation, getting to know these machines revealed to McCutcheon the fruits of relinquished control. “One thing I read about perfectionism is that it holds you back,” he says. “You feel like it’s working for you, and it’s seen as a positive thing, but it actually stops you from bringing your best work. It’s a defence mechanism against your ego. I see it in young producers who have to control everything.” Slowly, his own home studio is now filling with machines.

From the beginning of his career on Pinch’s Cold Recordings, McCutcheon has been almost pathologically resistant to settling into the armchair of expectation, avoiding creative stasis and feedback loops even as the stages grow. From never planning DJ sets to moving the Timedance club night away from The Island in Bristol to sidestep sonic pigeonholing, he regularly wipes the slate clean to avoid preconceptions. This has placed both himself and Timedance ahead of the curve in building relationships with scenes and producers from the Global South within bass music (see Verraco’s biblical Breathe… Godspeed EP from 2024), an area of rude health in an electronic music landscape often portrayed as slowing to a crawl. 

As the music writer Simon Reynolds presciently noted with his 2011 book Retromania, a dearth of the factors required to motivate the exchange of new ideas has meant that pure nostalgia has become legal tender. In the 2020s, that currency has only appreciated in value. “It can be an easy escape, I think, in an era with access to so much information,” McCutcheon offers, stressing that there’s nothing necessarily wrong with delving into the past for inspiration. “We have the ability to have so much more cross-pollination, and artists from different worlds working together. But sometimes the opportunities can feel almost overwhelming. There’s an easy path, which is to follow nostalgia and things that feel defined. But we have the opportunity as artists to make things that have never been heard before, and I feel like that’s a responsibility we should honour.”

However, as he alludes, this is a Eurocentric perspective. One only has to look at São Paulo funk mandelão or South African amapiano alone as examples of cutting-edge sounds that have imprinted themselves on culture this decade. “There’s so much interesting music taking place outside the western hemisphere of electronic music,” McCutcheon says, “and I draw on those ideas that feel on the fringes.” Dozzy continues: “It’s an age where electronic music is becoming outernational. It means different cultures are crossing over and there are many hybrids happening. This was unthinkable 20 years ago, when house was house, techno was techno. This is a very important signal for the music.”

In another twist of fate, it was from McCutcheon’s home turf that a similar crossing over of electronic sounds changed Dozzy’s creative impetus. In 1995, he was a university student and budding DJ, only just beginning to learn how to be professional and handle crowds, when the spacious, mind-wandering qualities of Massive Attack’s Protection and seductive nightcalls of Portishead’s Dummy struck him in quick succession – both the perfect blend of the hip-hop he was enamoured with at the time and dub’s vast well of possibilities. He followed his instinct and took his university friends with him, playing Bristol trip-hop in clubs and fostering a reputation for uncompromising deep listening.

That singular purpose has coursed through him until recently, when what he hints at as “really extreme” personal events took place shortly after the Rome session that birthed Exhale. Dozzy says that the album’s title couldn’t be more fitting in the context of his life, but the promise of working and playing with McCutcheon, and of tracing the Bristol thread back to the trip-hop scene that changed his life, kept him going as he reconnected with music and the world. “I can honestly say that Omar is my connection to a scene that changed my life,” he says. “It’s why I love him more.”

Once the Zoom call terminates, McCutcheon and Dozzy’s paths diverge once more: the latter to his beach house to rest and recuperate in a rare 48 hours off, and the former to São Paulo for a run of debut gigs in Brazil. But both McCutcheon and Dozzy say that their connection runs too deep to be exhausted in a single evening of studio fervour, not least with their looming four-hour b2b at Bristol’s Sawmills in July. “I’m already looking forward to a second chapter,” Dozzy says, suggesting they reverse the process next time, with Batu recording ideas for him to complete. “Only at that moment will the process be complete. This is what I learned from my 55 years of age: everything needs to loop back at some point.”